How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life) (ABC) - Series Premiere: Synopsis and Review

On Wednesday April 3rd, the new comedy series ‘How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life)’ premiered on ABC. The show stars Sarah Chalke (‘Scrubs’) as Polly, a recently divorced single mom. Polly moves back in with her mother, Elaine (Elizabeth Perkins, ‘Weeds’) and her step dad, Max (Brad Garrett, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’), to get her life back on track. Her parents are very eccentric and her ex-husband is clearly not over her yet and comes by a lot, thus things don’t really go as planned.

Polly works in a grocery store where she makes the smoothies. Polly has had an eye on the cute guy that visits the store every day. Her boss comes up to her and tells her this guy is going to ask her out on a date, but he’s very shy so he pretends he’s looking at the vegetables. She walks up to him and starts a conversation, and ends up with a date.

She doesn’t want her daughter, Natalie (Rachel Eggleston), to know about the date. Her parents can’t keep a secret so she doesn’t want them to know either. Polly makes up a story about a work-related party. Natalie is afraid of a lot of things and Polly’s parents have the tendency to confront people with their fear, but even though she’s really not comfortable with it, she lets her parents babysit. When Polly is picked up, her parents figure out what’s going on, and try not to tell Polly’s daughter. This proves to be too difficult, because Elaine blurts out the secret anyway. To make matters worse, they confront Natalie with her fear of dogs, even though Polly specifically told them not to.

With Polly’s date things also don’t go as planned. The guy took some medicine to calm his nerves but Polly tells him it won’t hurt if he drinks cocktails anyway. However, this is a bad idea since medicine and alcohol don’t mix. He can’t hold his liquor and medicine too well and Polly has to bring him home. When she gets home herself she sees the puppy her parents bought for Natalie and she cowers in fear. Polly then realizes Natalie is afraid of things, just because Polly taught her to be afraid of those things.

‘How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life)’ not only has a horrible name (seriously, what were they thinking?!), the comedy in the show is also bad. Although the actors portrayed their characters pretty well, the jokes weren't funny at all. Nothing in this episode made me laugh, it was just one big cliché. I don’t recommend you to watch this show; don't even try the first episode. I for one hope this show will be cancelled, but since it has 'Modern Family' as a lead-in, it might do quite good in the ratings.

‘How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life)’ airs on Wednesdays at 9:30/8:30c on ABC.